Figuring out the bones for MNESIS was pretty difficult at first, actually. I knew that I had a spell system that used memories, but that was about it. So, the first thing I did was amend the concept a little: memories are attached to emotions, which are what charge and determine the type of spell being cast. Awesome, I could now work with that. I figured that emotions could be a good replacement for stats. All I needed to figure out now was which stats to use, which emotions could represent it, and how rolls even work.

Early on into development, I knew that I wanted everything to be about balancing. You can’t rely too much on specific emotions, you can’t rely on magic too much, everything had a sort of “give and take” way of going about things originally. But how would I represent something like that? At first, I had the idea of using something like Charles E. Osgood’s Semantic Differential scale. Each emotion would have an opposite attached to it, so “Happy” and “Sad” would be two ends of the scale, making something based off Robert Plutchik’s Wheel of Emotions. There would be something along the lines of “you can’t minmax and rely on one emotion only, that will throw you off balance and cause trouble for everyone mechanically.” I wasn’t entirely sure how, but I knew that I’d figure it out along the way when it comes to me in the middle of the night.

It was incredible, I knew I had something on my hands. I just needed to refine it.

And then it turns out that someone already beat me to the punch on that, hahaha!